Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

If you're in the business world more than five minutes you've probably been audited or even investigated. This experience ranges from when you started running a cash register in an entry-level position and having someone spot-balance your till, all the way up to having an auditor or investigator dispatched to investigate some perceived or suspected irregularity. My first response to this as a junior staff member was to be offended; after all, I know my integrity and intentions so what makes someone think otherwise? As you grow your career and have staff, especially if you have a hand-picked and trusted staff like I have, its easy to take up their cause and be offended on their behalf. The plain truth is that this is one area where you have to grow thick skin and love your auditors as yourself. Not only should you not mind audits or investigations (this is assuming you're conducting your business as you should be) but you should welcome them. Here's why: Audits Pro...

If someone were to ask me what I really believe in and know to be true, along with the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Communion of the Saints, and the power of prayer I would list The Business Cycle . Anybody whose been in business for long has seen it for themselves and heard the age-old phrase, "What comes up must go down". The fact that "everybody knows that" however, is an assumption we can't make because a lot of your young staffers have never seen a down cycle. They hear the hystrionics of the mass media and believe we're all going to die broke, and very soon. Here are some facts to help you and your staff through the trough and back up to the inevitable peak. Unemployment? Take a good macroeconomics course and you'll hear that full employment in this country is an unemployment rate of 4 - 4.5%. That's because, historically, about that percentage of the U.S. population is in transition at any given time. By transition I mean just coming out...

I generally am loathe to talk about something new before its tested and fully functional. However, at last week's Publishing Compensation meetings I heard several comments about why we're not talking about our telecommuting pilot program. I haven't been because its a test , meaning we don't know what we don't know and are trying to learn. Still, the enthusiasm for the test is such that a lot of people apparently want to know about it. We began a pilot program in HR about 9 or 10 months ago, without telling anybody (including the ELT and my boss the CEO) what we were doing. The idea was this: if a face-to-face service department like HR could leverage the technology available to us with zero additional investment and no drop-off in service, then almost any business unit in the company could do the same. None of us own laptops, none of us carry a blackberry, and we committed no funds to the program. Instead, we worked with our IT department (and what great part...